Witold Pilecki

Witold Pilecki (13 May 1901-25 May 1948) was the founder of the Secret Polish Army, a 19,000-strong Polish Underground resistance unit that later joined the Home Army. Pilecki escaped from the Auschwitz concentration camp and gathered intelligence on it for the Allied Powers, and he also took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

Biography
Witold Pilecki was born on 13 May 1901 in Olonets, Karelia, Russian Empire to a family of Poles that had been forcibly resettled after the failed 1863 January Uprising. In 1918, Pilecki joined the military of a newly-independent country of Poland and fought in the Polish-Soviet War, including in the retreat from Kiev. After the invasion of Poland ended in two weeks in September-October 1939, Pilecki founded the Secret Polish Army (TAP) to fight against Nazi Germany's occupation of Poland during World War II. Pilecki later volunteered to be captured by the Wehrmacht and interned at the Auschwitz concentration camp so that he could pass on vital information about the death camps to the United Kingdom and the Western Allies, and he spent two and a half years in the camp before escaping in 1943 and detailing the concentration camps to the Allies. Pilecki went on to take part in the Warsaw Uprising in the summer of 1944, and he was loyal to the Polish government-in-exile until the end of the war. After the war, the Soviet Union's NKVD accused him of treason against the country on behalf of MI6, and Pilecki was executed by the NKVD in 1948.